Site update: quick overview

Okay, I've finished updating and re-organizing the site. The big changes are:

1. You can now create accounts for yourselves.
2. You will need to solve a CAPTCHA to either create an account or to post a comment anonymously.
3. You can now 'watch' a post of mine, meaning that new comments on that post will be emailed to you. (And no, you don't need to create an account or log in to do this.)

So, I guess that the bad news is that I did need to inconvenience my beloved commenters with a CAPTCHA. But to mitigate this unfortunate necessity, I did set things up so that you only need to solve a CAPTCHA once: when you create an account. And even that can be avoided by logging in with an OpenID (I think).

Furthermore, I turned the spam-filter off completely, so that legitimate comments should never again be mistakenly deleted or quarantined.

Lastly, I added something that should make this site more friendly: the ability to 'watch' posts and get notified of activity by email. You can choose to be notified of new comments, of updates to the post, or both. There is no way to watch only for replies to your comments, unfortunately, but I don't think that will be much of an issue. Both registered and anonymous users (meaning logged-in and not-logged-in) can watch posts, and registered users can even see what posts they are watching.

If you have already left comments on this site and now create an account for yourself, let me know and I will retroactively assign your comments to your new identity.

Please let me know of any bugs, inconveniences, wierdnessess and suggestions you may have. I tested this as much as I could, and added all the features that seemed useful, but I will (of course) missed something obvious.

Thanks for your patience, and I look forward to getting back to the point of this blog: sporadic posts about computer security research.

Update: I've added a widget served by an external site (http://rpxnow.com/, credit where credit is due) which allows you to automagically create accounts and log in using accounts you almost certainly have at other large providers: Google, LiveJournal, etc. I can choose the providers available to you-- up to six of them. So, please let me know if none of the providers listed will work for you. (And please note that the last 'provider' is a fully-general OpenID URL.)